I submitted my application for a Business Analyst role via the Amazon jobs portal. I was contacted by a recruiter shortly thereafter. She set up an interview with a team member pretty quickly after. I was informed that this would be a part behavioral and technical interview.
The first interview was one run by a team member-- not the hiring manager but someone adjacent to this team's hiring manager. This interview was good. The interviewer went directly into questions about my experience but did not ask any technical (SQL) questions. I was a bit surprised by the latter as I had prepared for a SQL interview.
I was moved to the virtual onsite interview where I spoke with six folks for about one hour each. The recruiter had prepped me by telling me that this would be STAR focused, and discussed which Amazon principles were most important to this role.
The onsite interviews felt almost like an interrogation; I did not feel comfortable in the setting. I am a woman of color and spoke with five white men in a row who seemed to challenge and attempt to invalidate my professional experiences. I did not feel any rapport with the interviewers.
In the end, I never heard feedback from my recruiter despite the fact that I sent multiple emails, two calls, and a voicemail. I was ghosted. For all of the effort that I put into the interview process, an email rejection would have been welcomed.
The interview process includes a SQL test, an initial recruiter call, and a final five-round loop featuring technical questions and discussions focused on Amazon leadership principles with different team members.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked a key question focused on both technical depth and culture fit: how you apply your skills to solve real problems, along with examples demonstrating alignment with Amazon’s leadership principles.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Interviewed for Business Analyst role at Amazon and honestly the process felt exhausting and impersonal.
The interviewers seemed far more focused on checking boxes against the 14 Leadership Principles than actually understanding the candidate or having a genuine conversation. Almost every question was another version of a STAR behavioral scenario, even when it barely related to the actual role.
The process felt extremely rehearsed and rigid. There was little effort to make the candidate feel comfortable or valued, and it often felt like they had already decided the outcome before the interview even started.
Technical and analytical depth barely mattered compared to how perfectly you could package stories into Amazon’s preferred format. If you don’t have polished STAR stories memorized for every possible situation, the process can feel unnecessarily difficult and draining.
Overall, one of the most mentally exhausting interview experiences I’ve had.
The basic STAR format, but the team was not clear about what they were looking for. The recruiter was not very responsive and took a long time to schedule the calls